THE LIVING PILE. 477 



As Montgomery finely says : 



" Millions of millions thus, from age to age, 

 With simplest skill, and toil unweariable, 

 No moment and no movement unimproved, 

 Laid line on line, on terrace terrace spread, 

 To swell the heightening, brightening, gradual mound, 

 By marvellous structure climbing towards the day. 

 Each wrought alone, yet all together wrought, 

 Unconscious, not unworthy, instruments, 

 By which a Hand invisible was rearing 

 A new creation in the secret deep .... 



I saw the living pile ascend, 

 The mausoleum of its architects, 

 Still dying upwards as their labours closed .... 

 Frail were their frames, ephemeral their lives, 

 Their masonry imperishable. All 

 Life's needful functions, food, exertion, rest, 

 By nice economy of Providence 

 Were overruled to carry on the process 

 Which out of water brought forth solid rock. 



" Atom by atom thus the burthen grew, 

 Even like an infant in the womb, till Time 

 Delivered Ocean of that monstrous birth 

 A Coral Island stretching east and west." 



Corallines have recently been discovered, in the course 

 of the deep-sea dredgings of Dr. Carpenter and others, at 

 a depth of 600 fathoms and upwards ; but these deep-sea 

 corals are wholly different in character from the reef- 

 building zoophyte. Some of the species now existing, 

 as, for example, the Haplopkyllia paradoxa and Geognia 

 annulata, are identical with those which nourished in 

 the ocean-waters of the Palaeozoic age. We owe to 

 Count Pourtales our earliest information of the deep-sea 

 corals. Numerous stony corals were dredged up from 

 the bottom of the Strait of Florida, under his super- 

 intendence, in 1868 and 1869.* 



A new group of coral islands in the North Pacific was 



* L. P. de Pourtales, Illustrated Catalogue of the Museum of Comparative 

 Zoology, 1871; Contributions to the Fauna of the Gulf-Stream, 1870. 



